August 18, 2017 | George Washington: What an Imbecile!

Bill Bonner

Is an American author of books and articles on economic and financial subjects. He is the founder and president of Agora Publishing, and author of the daily financial column, Diary of a Rogue Economist.

The Killing of “Little Nellie”

Here’s what Robert E. Lee’s wartime servant, William Mack Lee – who had been freed 10 years before the war started – said of his master:

I was raised by one of the greatest men in the world. There was never one born of a woman greater than General Robert E. Lee, according to my judgment.

William Lee accompanied General Lee – or “Marse Robert,” as he called him – throughout the entire war.

He was with him at Cheat Mountain, the Seven Days, Manassas, South Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Deep Bottom… and finally the Appomattox Court House – practically all the blood-soaked disasters of the War Between the States.

He cooked. He cleaned. He brought Marse Robert his horse. He served visiting Confederate generals. He was wounded in the head and in the hip and walked with a limp the rest of his life.

In his memoirs, he recalled only one incident in which General Lee was angry with him – on July 3, 1863.

A group of generals was coming for a meeting. They had to be fed. But there was no food other than Lee’s favorite laying hen. Seeing no alternative, the cook put the hen in the pot.

A 19th-century scribe recorded a tear in William Lee’s eye as he recounted the incident 30 years later:

I jes’ had to go out and cotch little Nellie. I picked her good; and stuffed her with breod stuffin’, mixed wid butter. Nellie had be gwine wid us two years, and I hated fer to lose her. We had been gettin’ all our eggs from Nellie.

Well, sir, when I brung Nellie inter de commissary tent and set her fo’ Marse Robert he turned to me right fo’ all dem gimmin and he says: “William, now you have killed Nellie. What are we going to do for eggs?”

“I jes’ had ter do it, Marse Robert,” says I.

“No, you didn’t, William; I’m going to write Miss Mary about you. I’m going to tell her you have killed Nellie.”

—

Cranes and Dynamite

What did William Lee know of Robert E. Lee?

He worked for him closely throughout the four years of the bloodiest war in America’s history.

They lived in tents through bitter cold winters, muddy springs, and stifling summers. They saw men die… thousands of them… with no medicines to save them and no morphine to ease the pain.

William Lee saw his master up close and under pressure. He knew him well, but only as a man, not a god.

But like all the people who lived before us, William Lee must have been a fool. We are all so much wiser… so much smarter… so much better now.

We know now that his master deserved no honors, no praise, and no fond remembrance.

All the statues of Robert E. Lee will have to come down. So will practically all those of America’s antebellum presidents.

And while we are rooting out symbols of slavery, let’s take the cranes and dynamite to those slave-built monuments in Europe and North Africa, too. The pyramids in Egypt. The Parthenon and the Acropolis in Greece. The Colosseum in Italy.

And why stop there?

What about the Kaaba in Mecca, the Taj Mahal in India, the Mayan pyramids, the Great Wall of China, and Angkor Wat?

And what about the works of Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Marcus Aurelius, Sun Tzu, Dante, and Virgil?

Who brought them tea? Who cleaned their houses? Surely their books – monuments to these dumbbells (didn’t they know better?) – should be burned.

All vestiges of the evil past should be razed to the ground.

Yes, that’s it. We will rid the world of every trace of slavery once and for all… and finally live in the perfection that we – practically gods ourselves, all-knowing, never erring – deserve.

Gods and Devils

We end with our head hanging low… looking at our feet – there, the ground on which we stand, is the hell into which we have fallen.

Donald Trump – for all his balderdash and flimflam – is right: The news is fake. But that is the way it always is.

William Lee knew his master as a mason knows a granite rock – as a real man. We know him only as a cartoon character, a fake man, a god or a devil… depending on which way the media winds are blowing.

And today blows a gale of self-congratulation. For now, finally, after so many centuries, we have reached some peak of moral and intellectual superiority. We know the Truth.

Now we know that yesterday’s heroes were traitors and terrorists. Yesterday’s gods were mere devils. And yesterday’s great thinkers were morons.

But wait… What will tomorrow’s saints and geniuses think of us?

What will they think of the 2.2 million people in our prisons? That’s more than anywhere else on Earth; only the Soviet-era gulags and Nazi concentration camps had more.

What will they think of our murderous wars – more than 2 million dead in the Middle East in America’s “War on Terror”? “What was that all about?” they will ask.

What will they think of our phony-baloney money system – leading to the biggest debt bubble in world history… sure to be followed by the biggest blow-up ever?

What will they think of robbing our middle-class producers to make Wall Street and Deep State insiders richer?

And what will they think of the hubris… the intolerance… the gall… of people who judge their fathers and grandfathers so harshly and earnestly believe they are smarter and better than the 10,000 generations that preceded them?